I Wanna Build A Custom PC For Producing And Recording

Whats good, I been looking at sites like cyberpowerpc and others to build custom pc's. Everything I find for custom build is basically for gaming. I'm not switching to a mac I'm sticking with a desktop but what road should I go down for building a pc. Right now I'm currently working with a dell c521 with 2.4ghz amd processor but I dont think it's fast enough. Looking for any recomendations or some road to look down for building something for producing and recording. Thanks in advance

Aight sounds good, should I just get the standard video card that comes with the motherboard or should I upgrade it because I heard the video cards are helpful towards DAW's. Not an all out videocard but something just a little step up

you could go that route nowadays since onboard video is much better then a few years ago. Keep in mind a good video card will prevent the system from having to use system's RAM since it will have it's own RAM. So if you go the onboard video route make sure it has some video ram as well.

Aight sounds good, should I just get the standard video card that comes with the motherboard or should I upgrade it because I heard the video cards are helpful towards DAW's. Not an all out videocard but something just a little step up

Yeah the more powerful the card the more features it has which won't take away from the system's resources. But if the recording software isn't that demanding visually, then I'd suggest going with one with no less than 512mb of RAM on the card.

As far as memory and an external hdd, you're picking a good time to get them because memory is cheap now and hdd are coming down so nows the time to get em. I'm going to be building my DAW and music server soon and when I finish I'll post up the specs and some pics.

Good shit for real. I havent started building the daw yet but in my current computer I have 6GB of Ram, 1.0TB Western Digital Black Caviar HDD, western digital 500GB external hard drive, and a seagate 160gb hard drive.. I plan on getting another one of those wd black caviar hard drives for the new daw as well. Thing I'm stuck on right now is if I wanna keep AMD or go back to intel. Probably gonna get an Asus motherboard cause I see those is real good.

No, not maybe get an external. Not having an External HD if your serious about your music shit is suicide lol. I wanna get a second one in case somethin happens with one of those.

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There goes the answer to my decision right above.....I'm going to eventually have to buy it anyways....I might as well just get it out of the way....

Im going to cop me a nice azz Hard Drive....and 2G of ram...which is the max for my motherboard...I plan to upgrade the board also but later...in the near future....

Ive Read that when buying a hard drive for music there's three things that you should look at before droppin your paper...

Spindle Speed should be at 7,200 rpm

The seek time should be less than 10 millisecs...

and the buffer size should be a 2MB buffer...

Probably gonna get an Asus motherboard cause I see those is real good.

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Yea I plan to invest into a better rmother board also.... I want a board that supports dual core proccessors....right now I got this board that doesnt support dual core...I thought about just upgrading the pentium 4 chip with Hyper Threading Technology....but I read that Dual Cores are the Shyt for Music....

I just may have to check into that Asus Board Reviews....

I rather to keep upgrading the internal parts of my P/C DAW before I break myself trying to buy every new Motif or Nord or Fantom...shyt even the Meko'....etc...Make My Own Dam Meko'...then come up with my own name for my shyt....

Just buy a throw'd Midi Board....and put that DAW that you build to work....

thats my fear right there of losing shit, i got 2 external hard drives and both has backups, one i got tucked somewhere not hooked up or nothing.

im stuck right now tho cause i wanna build this up but what i think i might do just for now is upgrade the cpu on my current computer and then get my monitors and mixer and see how it turns out. current computer isnt bad at all right now but i guess im goin by what they say, if it aint broke dont fix it

externals are weak.... I lost everything i did from 03-04 counting on a damn external.... u gotta have a backup for your external too... I use an old studio PC

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Oh Sol' Don't Hurt Our Feelings Like That...lol...

Maybe you just had an bad experience with one....and I'm sure there are others that feel the same way as you...but I also know that there are Happy External hard Drive Users....that have not had any problems....

Maybe the Drive you Had was defective...Low Life Expectancy...

Maybe it was in a Bad spot in the lab...??...They Say that Dust and Heat or Electronics worst enemies...

you're right BK, I'm generalizing all externals...maybe there are better ones...I've owned a Western Digital and a Maxtor (dont remember the specs) but I didn't like either, and both of them scare the shit out of me every time I plug it in and wait for it to scan the files.

I'll never buy a Maxtor EVER, had an experience that I could never forgive/forget...At the end of '07, I was the "guest host" on MTV's show "NEXT." The prize girl liked rappers, so they made all of the contestants freestyle a song for her. She would decide whether to NEXT them or keep them while they were freestyling in the studio. I was responsible to provide all the beats and to be chilling in the studio with the girl when she nexted people. I had met with the show's producer at my spot before the show, we selected all the beats, everything was great. I copied wave files of the beats to my external. A few weeks later, I pull up to the spot (some studio in hollywood) with my external containing all the beats. I go into the studio, meet up with the show's producer, he leads me to the engineer at the studio. I give him the external. We go to load in the beats, except as he loads them into protools, the files are looking strange. It looks normal for the first 30-45 seconds, then the waveforms started looking wierd as fuck. Before he loaded them all, I told him to play one of the files. It sounded good, then the file started skipping, and then it morphed into a totally different file. After 30 seconds, one of the beats turned into some R&B vocals that I had recorded in Atlanta at least 4 years ago. It occurred to me that somehow the external was fucking up and scrambling file information, but it was strange as fuck cuz I had deleted all those files off the external at least 2 years ago LOL. All the beats were scrambled and fucked. None of those files could work. but I was counting on that type of shit, it never fails. I had a few backup CDs of the beats, and they worked fine. I shoulda learned my lesson about externals then.

I was just about to mention about backing up your shyt with CD's.....You could buy a big azz cd folders....then burners your files to cd...something like a master copy...that will work too.....unless yo house burnt down...

What About Online Storage?....They shyt may crash too huh?....lol...

That was a crazy azz experience with that hard Drive Sol'....

I wonder though which one is the Best Hard Drive....

Its it the Seagate...the Western Digital...the Maxtor....or Internal...

I don't think there is a Best One....I bet there's a person somewhere with a story for each one...

word that definatly sucks with that story. so far my experience with western digital external and internal, never had any problems what so ever. seagate external i had for 2 years no problems, seagate internal had for 4+ years in one computer and never no problems. Mind there has been tons of porn and viruses on them lol but all lasted

So far I don't see any problem with your current system's specs. Depending on the bus speed and a few other things you might not need to build another system. What I would do is look into utilizing RAID on that system for redundancy. As far as AMD vs INTEL lol....it's really about preference. AMD will be less expensive then Intel both are good so that's my 2 cents.

Good shit for real. I havent started building the daw yet but in my current computer I have 6GB of Ram, 1.0TB Western Digital Black Caviar HDD, western digital 500GB external hard drive, and a seagate 160gb hard drive.. I plan on getting another one of those wd black caviar hard drives for the new daw as well. Thing I'm stuck on right now is if I wanna keep AMD or go back to intel. Probably gonna get an Asus motherboard cause I see those is real good.